Sunday, 9 April 2017

Simple explanations are always wrong, and so are complex explanations - but complex explanations are more misleading

This is a view I have always held about science - that the best explanations are so simple that there is the least danger of us accepting them as literal truth. By contrast complex explanations are wrong but more likely to mislead us into supposing that they are complete... having struggled to understand and remembering them, we may develop an excessive devotion to their literal truthfulness.

All explanations are partial - the best explanations are valid but imprecise: a blurred picture, as it were. The blurriness ought to be a constant reminder that the image is not the thing itself.

But most explanations are partial and biased and highly precise - such as the statistical models and measurements so beloved by bureaucrats and pseudo-scientists. They are like tiny, sharp pictures of tiny, broken pieces of reality - with an implicit denial that anything else in reality matters apart from a single tiny sharp picture of a detached fragment.

Because the partial fragment is sharply seen, it is - in practice, although denied in theory - regarded as the only thing known, the only thing of importance. This is normal and usual in recent generations in philosophy, science, in management... in all modern institutions; and indeed the legalism ('Phariseeism') of ancient religions is another expression of the same phenomenon.

(So much 'logic' - and mathematics as applied to actual situations - has exactly this falsehood; the units of reasoning are apparently precise but actual broken fragments of arbitrarily-defined real-world significance.)

Instead, we can adopt a very simple idea of 'the whole thing' - with a clear accompanying comprehension that it is only a blurry and imprecise vision of totality, with exceptions.

So - in terms of the divine plan and the human conditions; all we need is a simple idea of the nature of the divine (loving, personal) and purpose (to raise us towards divinity) - and an expectations that exact personal individual specifics cannot be clearly defined for all individuals in any comprehensive overview description.

These must necessarily be sorted-out, as best we can, using that inner guidance system which is another factor described in the simple idea.

[The idea behind this is that of understanding the human condition in relation to matters such as our original creation, being children of God, pre-mortal life, incarnation and the possibility of re-incarnation, death and resurrection, the qualities of eternal life, the levels of consciousness... Any possible schema we may make to describe the actual situation is open to the true criticism that it over-simple. And yet the proper answer is not to increase the complexity of the schema in response to every criticism, to cover every eventuality... but instead to accept that - since we are each individual and unique persons - each destiny and trajectory is also unique and individual - so any possible expressible schema is inadequate to cover all actual and possible eventualities. Reality is both coherent And extraordinarily various!]